Speaking for myself, it amounts, essentially, to a desire to play the game like anyone else and be reasonably left alone about it.

There is nothing wrong with immortals wanting to play the game.
But what differs immortals from mortal players? You may notice that they wish to "be reasonably left alone", while mortals don't really care about anonymity ( after a character dies ).
You've listed some reasons and they are valid.
But they are symptomes. The reason is "secrecy" and how CF is designed around it.

I don't want to deal with any of that ####. I just want to play the ####ing game. To compete, win, and lose like anyone else.

The price of being an implementor in a game that evolves around "secrecy" is that you can't really compete, win and lose like anyone else.
People on staff have big advantage. For example, the wand system.
Every immortal with the "snoop" command may easily find many wand sources just by snooping skilled mages even if they don't really were looking for wands. You don't even have to be an implementor who places those wands.
To make a fair competition immortals would have to put big restrictions on themselves ( like not wearing uber eq, not using wands, not snooping other imperials if they play imperials themselves so they wouldn't accidentally run into a conspiracy against them ). It is not a fun way to play the game and I'm not one who would demand that from immortals.

The only way to solve that problem is to reduce secrecy as much as possible and thus create fair competition.
I've heard from immstaff that mystery and secrecy it is what makes the game long-living. But there are many other games that don't rely on mystery and still are fun to play.
Chess, poker, football. Hell, a lot of people ( many more than CF playerbase ) still play Starcraft and Quake ( almost for 10 years already ). So there are ways around. Secrecy is not necessary to make a great game. Actually it may attract some players and turn away other players. I know several CFers who don't play CF anymore and one of reasons why they don't want to start again is that they are far behind and don't know new areas/wands/etc nor they want to reexplore CF from scratch ( or don't have time to do that ).

I don't believe that CF will start to change and reduce secrecy as much as possible ( at least as long as Valg rules ) though I, personally, don't think that exact skill/spell description, full identify of tems ( except, perhaps, quest ones ) would kill the game. CF is much more than that. For example, there are many RPG games where you can obtain a lot game mechanics info from manuals ( or web ) and they are still very good games.

You just have to understand that as long as you keep that level of secrecy in CF immortals will have big advantage in competition and accept that. The only thing you can do about it is not pushing that advantage hard and put some sort of restrictions on themselves if you aim for "fair" competition. Also in order to avoid jealous players immortals would want to stay anonymous. Mwahahaa.
In "opened" games implementors usually have a lot less reasons to stay anonymous, as they can't really be accused in using "unfair" advantage.

Also, in case of Cabdru, anonymity wasn't really needed
The playerbase was more positive about him, than negative. There always will be bad apples but you can't make everyone happy.